Table Of ContentSee You at the Crossroads: Hip Hop Scholarship at the
Intersections
CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE: CURRICULUM STUDIES IN ACTION
Volume 7
Series Editors
Brad Porfilio, California State University at East Bay, USA
Julie Gorlewski, State University of New York at New Paltz, USA
David Gorlewski, D’Youville College, Buffalo, NY, USA
Editorial Board
Sue Books, State University of New York at New Paltz, USA
Dennis Carlson, University of Miami, Ohio, USA
Ken Lindblom, Stony Brook University, New York, USA
Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia, Canada
Christine Sleeter, California State University, Monterey, USA
Eve Tuck, State University of New York, Paltz, USA
Scope
“ Curriculum” is an expansive term; it encompasses vast aspects of teaching and learning.
Curriculum can be defined as broadly as, “The content of schooling in all its forms” (English,
p. 4), and as narrowly as a lesson plan. Complicating matters is the fact that curricula are
often organized to fit particular time frames. The incompatible and overlapping notions that
curriculum involves everything that is taught and learned in a particular setting and that this
learning occurs in a limited time frame reveal the nuanced complexities of curriculum studies.
“Constructing Knowledge” provides a forum for systematic reflection on the substance
(subject matter, courses, programs of study), purposes, and practices used for bringing about
learning in educational settings. Of concern are such fundamental issues as: What should be
studied? Why? By whom? In what ways? And in what settings? Reflection upon such issues
involves an inter-play among the major components of education: subject matter, learning,
teaching, and the larger social, political, and economic contexts, as well as the immediate
instructional situation. Historical and autobiographical analyses are central in understanding
the contemporary realties of schooling and envisioning how to (re)shape schools to meet the
intellectual and social needs of all societal members. Curriculum is a social construction that
results from a set of decisions; it is written and enacted and both facets undergo constant
change as contexts evolve.
This series aims to extent the professional conversation about curriculum in contemporary
educational settings. Curriculum is a designed experience intended to promote learning.
Because it is socially constructed, curriculum is subject to all the pressures and complications
of the diverse communities that comprise schools and other social contexts in which citizens
gain self-understanding.
See You at the Crossroads: Hip Hop Scholarship at the
Intersections
Dialectical Harmony, Ethics, Aesthetics, and Panoply of Voices
Edited by
Brad Porfilio
California State University at East Bay, USA
Debangshu Roychoudhury
Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
and
Lauren M. Gardner
Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6209-672-1 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-673-8 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-674-5 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2014 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface: Hip Hop at the Intersection of Passion, Promise and Possibility vii
Brad Porfilio, Debangshu Roychoudhury & Lauren Gardner
Hip Hop Education & Critical Pedagogy
1. Hip-Hop and Pedagogy, More Than Meets the Eye: What Do
We Expect, What Will We Measure? 3
Raphael Travis Jr. & Alexis Maston
2. A Pedagogy of Cultural Sustainability:
YEGH3 (Edmonton Hip-Hop History) as a Decentralized Model for
Hip-Hop’s Global Microhistories 29
Michael B. MacDonald
3. “We Do It for The People”: Spoken Word Poets and Hip-Hop
Artists as Agents of Social Change 45
Crystal Endsley
Hip Hop Spirituality & Identity
4. Baptized in Dirty Water: An Ontology of Hip-Hop’s
Manufacturing of Socio-Religious Discourse for Contextual Spirituality 59
Daniel White Hodge
5. You Better Lose Yourself!: Reformulated Praxis Theory,
Spirituality, and Hip-Hop Aesthetics 75
Kip Kline
6. Fashioning Self, Battling Society: Hip-Hop Graffi ti Jackets as a
Method of Positive Identity Development 93
Emery Petchauer & Antonio Garrison
7. “I Do Not Need Help to Defi ne Myself”: The Self-Location of
Somali Immigrant Youth through Discourse and Agency 111
Chelda Smith & Brian Lozenski
8. Are We There Yet?: The Political Power of ‘Aboriginal Hip-Hop’
in Australia 129
Chiara Minestrelli
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hip Hop Therapy & Hip Hop Psychology
9. From Voiceless to Victorious: Street Sounds and Social Skills for
Gang-Involved Urban Youth 149
Jaleel Abdul-Adil
10. Exploring the Healing Powers of Hip-Hop: Increasing Therapeutic
Effi cacy, Utilizing the Hip-Hop Culture as an Alternative Platform for
Expression, Connection 169
Sidney Dang, Derek Vigon & Jaleel Abdul-Adil
11. Theorizing Activism: Hip Hop & Human Development –
The Eternal Dance between Theory and Practice 181
Debangshu Roychoudhury, Lauren M. Gardner &
Anna Stetsenko
Author Biographies 195
vi
BRAD PORFILIO, DEBANGSHU ROYCHOUDHURY &
LAUREN GARDNER
PREFACE
Hip Hop at the Intersection of Passion, Promise and Possibility
OVERVIEW
It has been over thirty-five years since subjugated African American youth gathered
in New York City in response to the unjust social conditions impacting their schools,
families, and communities (Chang, 2005; Dimitriadis, 2001). Through various
innovative forms of cultural production – such as break dancing, rap narrative,
graffiti art, and music production – Hip-Hop artists, activists, youth and scholars
have been authentically expressing their concerns and making-meaning of the world
(Hill, 2009; Petchauer, 2009). Over the past three decades, Hip-Hop has become a
site of contestation with a corporate music industry incredibly adept at redirecting
Hip-Hop’s social energies away from critical expressions of struggle, protest, and
resistance towards messages of materialism, greed, and individualism (George,
2005; Prier, 2010; Porfilio & Viola; 2012).
While Hip-Hop emerged as an urban American art form and has grappled with the
corporate world contaminating its socially generative nature, it has gradually become
multicultural, been embraced and recontextualized internationally, and has become
a key action site through which Hip-Hop youth (and adults) critique, communicate,
and develop their position on issues affecting their personhood and their community
(Magubane, 2006; Perrilo, 2012; Porfilio & Carr, 2010; Lozenski, 2012; Porfilio,
Roychoudhury, & Gardner, 2013; Porfilio & Viola, 2012). The members of our
global culture critique the oppressive absolutism of grand- narratives in a way of
becoming the post-modernist of the boom-bap, break and beat-box; suggesting that
the Hip-Hop community seeks to become transformative intellectuals – a community
of global gad-flies who possess the expressive acumen to critique and transform
social inequity (Gardner & Roychoudhury, 2012). Social media has become a key
linchpin for global Hip-Hop youth generating alternative activities and practices
that will improve the quality of their lives as well as the lives of global citizens
across the planet. For instance, global Hip-Hop intellectuals are harnessing various
speed technology as a means through which they critique power structures and civic
institutions as well as engage in dissent movement to build a socially just world
(Porfilio, Gardner & Roychoudhury, 2013).
Over the past decade, Hip-Hop intellectuals, school leaders, schoolteachers, youth
activists and artists have also found fissures amid oppressive schooling contexts so
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PREFACE
as to implement Hip-Hop centered pedagogical projects dedicated to making youth
fully human (Freire, 2005). For instance, hundreds of thousands of youth across
North America been exposed to multimedia presentations, taken part in narrative
writing assignments, been involved in collaborative choreography workshops, and
been participants in dance performance, which are designed to make them reflect
upon and take action on the forces responsible for what causing human suffering and
misery. Although hip-hop based education (HHBE) should not be considered a silver
bullet holding the potency to position all youth to become reflective change agents, an
impressive body of research shows HHBE has engendered democratic relationships
between educators and students, has sparked youths’ critical consciousness and
positioned them as problem solvers in their schools, community, and the wider
world, as well as has enhanced students’ understanding of traditional and non-
traditional academic texts and improved their academic performance (Akom, 2009;
Bryan, 2012; Gosa & Fields, 2012; Petchauer, 2009; Sawyer, 2012).
Beside scholarship that focuses on HHBE, researchers across the globe have
captured the uniqueness of the aesthetic, the affordances, the ethics, and panoply
of voices represented in our culture. This volume seeks to illuminate hip-hop
scholarship at the intersections of various fields of study (including but not limited
to: sociology, psychology, social work, social justice studies, urban education,
pedagogy, criminal justice studies, law, critical race studies, Hip-Hop feminism,
theology & spirituality) (Andersen & Hill Collins, 2010; Fernandes, 2011, Porfilio
& Viola, 2012, Rabaka, 2011). It is our hope that this volume will expound upon
recent Hip-Hop scholarship by presenting snapshots of innovative work within
(and at the intersections between) these fields of scholarship, in order to uncover
the dialectical harmony and solidarity with which Hip Hop scholars, activists, and
artists collectively mobilize, stand together, and collaboratively sustain in hopes of
realizing social justice and actualizing global liberation.
PURPOSE
The purpose of this edited volume is to highlight critical intersections of thought,
integral calls to action, and crucial interdisciplinary collaborations that must be
acknowledged and mobilized in order to actualize emancipatory messages articulated
by creators and agents of counter-hegemonic Hip-Hop culture. Audre Lorde
(1984) recognizes an urgent need for the production of new cultural tools, when
she states “we can’t dismantle Master’s house with Master’s tools.” She also states
that modes of oppression and control such as violence, political control, economic
control, control of knowledge and information, control of sexuality must not be
galvanized as tools towards salvation. Equally important, liberation psychology
proclaims that freedom from oppression requires creating new tools for action.
Lev Vygotsky conceptualizes tools as things that human beings create to help solve
problems and oftentimes use to create systems of symbols, signs, and meanings
(1978). Creative human action tools can be leveraged towards achieving the goal of
viii
PREFACE
social transformation. This volume explicates the ways creative human action tools
are actualized through Hip Hop cultural production from diverse genres of Hip-
Hop scholarship. The contributors will describe how Hip-Hop cultural production
actualizes creative human action tools towards emancipatory imagination, creative
consciousness, critical consciousness, emancipatory knowledge-building, creative
nurturance, and collective identity affirmation.
The contributors employ theory, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods
research to provide thick descriptions of the social realties (e.g., globalization,
migration, poverty, criminalization, and racism) youth are resisting through what
we recognize as a decolonial cultural politic. Their collective work describes how
youth are employing Hip Hop to resist and transform the historical conditions that
are at the roots of their dispossession and suffering. Finally, the contributors theorize
how Hip Hop provides a counter space where divergent realities and intersecting
identities get negotiated and transformed towards a collective dialectical harmony
representative of the global reach of Hip-Hop culture.
SIGNIFICANCE
There is scant research on Hip Hop at the intersections of various fields of scholarship.
Furthermore, the voices of artists, activists, and scholars have not been widely
included in an equitable manner in genres of Hip-Hop scholarship. We believe that
a cross-section of critical literature available in various social science fields can
broaden our understanding of Hip-Hop scholarship and provide critical fodder for a
unified theoretical basis. Due to this paucity we feel it imperative to highlight Hip
Hop as a multi-domain phenomenon whose aesthetic cultural value needs the input
and representation from various fields of study in order to be complete. To be sure,
we recognize the important publications that broaden our understanding of Hip Hop
from a multidisciplinary intersectional perspective towards transformational ends
(Collins, 2006; Hadley & Yancy, 2012; Petchauer, 2012; Porfilio & Viola, 2012).
This collaborative project is of importance to scholars, practitioners, researchers,
youth, artists, and clergy who are interested in working at the intersections of urban
artistic expression, social justice, critical consciousness, Black feminism, therapy,
and spirituality. Finally, this project will highlight the importance of research projects
that link the production of interdisciplinary scholarship with the cultural activities,
everyday practice, and social concerns of global youth in order to ameliorate the
social, economic, and political problems that are transcending national boundaries
in an age of corporate “globalization.”
CONTENT AND ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
In addition to the introductory chapter, we have divided eleven chapters into three
sections. The first section is organized around the theme “Hip- Hop Education
and Critical Pedagogy” and it contains essays that focus on the methodologies of
ix
